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Friday, November 17, 2017

Show Notes: Season 3 Episode 5: Super Friends

*The All-New Superfriends Hour aired Saturdays at 8:00 on ABC against varying competition, most notably the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour. The next season, it morphed into Challenge of the Super Friends as the heroes waged battle against the Legion of Doom.

*This episode premiered Saturday morning, September 17, 1977.

*Aquaman seems like a questionable choice for a core Friend in retrospect, perhaps, but he was a proven presence in DC animation, having starred in his own Filmation cartoons in the Sixties.

*Wendy and Marvin were two dork--er, teenagerss who accompanied the Super Friends in the first season of the show. Of course they had a dog, too. Of course they did. The subsequent DC comic gave them a little bit of back story, but there wasn't much to them on the cartoon.

*That Super Friends comic book was an in-continuity adaptation of the show running from 1976-1981 and written by DC info guru E. Nelson Bridwell. It was geared to younger readers.

*The pat on the head we love so much:

*Jim Starlin is a longtime comics scribe known especially for his work on "cosmic" characters like Captain Marvel, Nova, and Thanos.

*Gleek apparently has no non-tail-based powers. He seems a direct creative descendant of Blip, the pet space monkey on Space Ghost.

*Bat Belt Mouse Compartment:

*As best we can tell, Aquaman would not survive LONG in outer space, but he is strong and invulnerable enough to not explode as soon as he is in it. Presumably he needs oxygen, though. Then again, we DO see him flying through space in the opening credits...

*Apache Chief's powers are the ability to grow really, really tall and the ability to track really, really well.

*The BOTNS research time found no link between Alan Moore and this TV show. In fact, a section for editing Wikipedia has this comment:

Is there a source for the "developed by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons" reference in the sidebar? I couldn't find any reference on google that didn't link back here.Moore would have been 23/24 when this came out, before he started working on Judge Dredd, before he'd done anything except some illustrations for NME. I suspect this is meant as a joke.

*For more info about the voice cast from this version of the series, we recommend heading to acclaimed author Marc Tyler Nobleman's Noblemania page for this great series of interviews.

*El Dorado, a Mexican hero, debuted with the Super Friends in 1981. He has an array of super powers like strength.

*Finally, here is our web version of our popular DECODER segment.

1) Take the first word in the theme song for this show:

2) Then take the letter next to the muppet right above Zoot in this picture:

3) Then count the number of students in this pic:

4) Finally, what are the Super Friends doing while Wonder Woman is talking?